1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a stapling device equipped with a stapler unit which travels along a path including a staple discarding position and plural stapling positions and performs stapling operation for fastening one position on plural stacked sheets.
2. Description of the Related Art
The above-described stapling device has hitherto been known. Of such stapling devices, a stapling device which fastens pieces of paper with one kind of staple (bent wire) regardless of the number of pieces of paper to be bound suffers a problem of tip ends of the bent staple become too long when the number of pieces of paper to be bound is small, thereby rendering the appearance of the staple poor.
In an attempt to solve the problem, there has been proposed a stapling device which offers staples of different lengths and replaces one kind of staple with another kind of staple in accordance with the number of pieces of paper to be bound (see, e.g., JP-A-2001-334502). However, this apparatus suffers a problem of operation for replacing staples becoming laborious, which in turn deteriorates operability.
For this reason, there has been proposed a stapler unit having a cutter for cutting unneeded ends of the staple (see, e.g., JP-UM-B-3-025931). The stapler unit having such a cutter is provided with a receiving section for temporarily holding staple tip ends cut during stapling operation which is performed by moving the stapler unit to a stapling position on a path. The staple tip ends received in the receiving sections are discarded into a staple recovery box disposed at a staple discarding position set on the path.
When the staple tip ends received in the receiving section are discarded into the staple recovery box, the stapler unit must temporarily depart from the stapling position. Thus, discarding the staple tip ends for preventing occurrence of overflow of staple tip ends from the receiving section results in deterioration of productivity. Meanwhile, when an attempt is made to minimize the number of operations for discarding the staple tip ends in order to improve productivity, overflow of the staple tip ends from the receiving section may arise.
When the staple tip ends received in the receiving section are discarded into the staple recovery box, the stapler unit must temporarily depart from the stapling position, thereby resulting in deterioration of productivity. For this reason, an increase in the volume of the receiving section is also conceivable. However, according to the proposal of JP-UM-B-3-025931, the volume of the receiving section is not discussed at all, and the extent to which the volume of the receiving section is to be increased is unknown.